Infinitely Many
by burningnostalgia
Summary: Boomer/Eight, Starbuck/Boomer. "Machines do not feel."


**Title:** Infinitely Many  
**Fandom:** Battlestar Galactica  
**Pairing:** Boomer/Eight, Starbuck/Boomer  
**Rating:** R  
**Disclaimers:** Not mine. Wish they were, though.  
**Notes:** **trascendenza** requested an Eight/Eight doppelcest fic, and I finally deliver. It took a while, as my muse was not cooperating with me (wanting to write Andromache/Helen during the Trojan War instead, stupid muse), so I'm terribly sorry. Beta-d by Monty and **noverin-ghost**, sort of. I couldn't resist tossing Kara in there.

**Infinitely Many**

Yellow light filters through the open passageways, warm unlike the harsh fluorescents in Galactica. They remind her of the midsummer sun on Aerelon, golden bright on her skin as she boarded the starship to Fleet Academy, years after the flood killed her parents.

She pauses in mid-stride, yellow light illuminating her troubled face. She is a Cylon (she did not have parents).

Cylons are machines (the humans said so, called them _toasters_), but she could not understand. (The Cylons are many, have many copies.) She could not be a machine.

She slips through a door and into a high-ceilinged room, white light glowing from somewhere hidden. Raiders lie docked in rows along the walls of the basestar, black-grey metal gleaming softly, almost docile in stillness. Curious (not afraid anymore), she moves closer, bare feet silent on the slick floors. The lack of scratches and scorch marks puzzles her, like how fingerprints never appear on the basestar's walls, how everything always seems so clean. She remembers them from her last mission with Racetrack, when she had to destroy the basestar, when she found out she was a Cylon (a machine, or so they said). Afterwards, it felt fitting to die surrounded by her once-comrades who considered her now as merely a thing. (Kara would've fought for her, but Kara was not there.) They were wrong. (Things do not die.) Her reflection stares back at her from the wall's smooth surface. She looks nothing like a machine (she looks human).

The metal is cool underneath her fingertips, disguising what she knows now is a vast network of synthesized veins and wire-like nerves underneath the gleam. It seems poetic, in a way, how elegant the lines of a Cylon Raider are, flowing curves and gentle dips, unlike those bulky Raptors she used to drive (all-purpose with no class). The Raider is still, its visage staring blankly ahead without the presence of the familiar oscillating red glow, yet it thrums with life in a way no Viper ever had, barely-contained energy ready to flow though conduits corded like muscle sinew at a moment's notice. A slumbering beast waiting for its master's call, not a machine (never a machine).

On the other hand, the Mark II Vipers were indifferent steel alloy frames, rubber-insulated copper wires and reinforced metal plating with screws bolting everything together. They were designed for optimum speed and maneuverability, able to rotate 180 degrees vertically in .35 seconds and pull a 360-degree spin without losing speed, built to pack enough firepower under the fuselage to level the Telamont Building. Vipers screamed like birds of prey across the dark of space underneath the steady hands of their pilots, flipped end-over-end with a single shift of the wrist, fired white-hot bolts of energy with a push of a button, but they were dead. Those were the machines, hollow and empty.

"I'm not a machine," she repeats softly, trying to understand (trying to convince).

"No, you're not."

She turns to face the voice. Elegant lines, flowing curves and gentle dips, hair dark like gunmetal, skin bronzed but smooth. She memorizes those features already, had felt them warm and alive underneath her fingertips, not cool like the metal of a Raider. They are her own, after all. But being human is hard to forget. She would hesitate sometimes, stepping back into Boomer where it was safe, where nightmares would not wake her up (breathing hard and sweaty), straining for a life that did not exist, human blood on her hands; where faint whispers of a memory would hold her tight, fading images of a soft body cradling hers, lips trailing down her stomach, tasting and teasing, honey-blond hair brushing hypersensitive skin (impulses racing across synthetic nerve endings), calloused fingers deep inside, thrusting hard and fast then gentle and slow (_please, don't stop_), dogtags pressing into her shoulder, the taste of sweat and faint traces of ambrosia on her tongue. Machines could not feel what she had felt in those precious moments (_close, so close_), sensations flashbulb-quick on the edge of her consciousness. (Machines do not feel.)

The other Eight steps closer, inches away from skin pressing on skin, aligned in perfect symmetry (identical copies, perfectly congruent). She touches her, tracing the sensitive arch of a smooth hip (like Kara, only gentler), running her fingers up her side, reaching up to cup full breasts. She sighs softly, covering Eight's hands with her own, breathing in her clean scent, the skin beneath her palms smooth and without blemish. (Perfect.)

She touches her cheek, feeling Eight's hands slip down to pull her closer, and the soft brush of fingers on her inner thigh feels much too warm all of a sudden. She stiffens, human instinct taking over, human senses overloading in memory (the earthy smell of sweat and dirt, black stains of engine grease streaking pale skin, roughness rasping against her, hips jerking up, soft cries filling the room), before she forces them down, panting at the sudden loss of feeling, clutching at Eight's shoulders for support.

"She is alive, in Caprica," Eight murmurs into her ear, breath tickling her skin, hands gentle on her bare back. Her heartbeat is steady, soothing away the memories. Small kisses on her collarbone, up her neck, and she sighs, palms rubbing lightly on Eight's shoulders, mapping familiar skin. Eight's lips press against hers, the kiss meant to calm (not to arouse). "You will see her again."

She nods, a smile lighting up her face as she stares into Eight's warm eyes. Cylons are not machines (cannot be machines). She knows this now with a certainty she is quite unfamiliar with, knows without seeing, and believes (that is faith). Eight's skin is flesh beneath her hands (soft and smooth, firm muscles underneath, not steel and wires) as she leans forward and captures her lips in another kiss, tongue and teeth and gasps eventually tangling into white noise. She tastes different (sweeter than Kara), smells a bit different, but feels the same, familiar and comforting.

Eight's breathing is hitched, faint whimpers slipping from her lips. She cannot stop touching, cannot stop tasting. (This is what it feels like being alive.) "Sharon," she whispers again and again, "Sharon. Sharon, don't stop._"_ And she (not-Boomer, Sharon) presses open-mouthed kisses to slick flesh, lapping at the moisture, feeling fingers threading through her hair, pulling roughly, muscles tensing.

She is beautiful when she comes.

Sharon waits for her, cradling her trembling body. They are different but the same but unique; many copies, many lives. Eight kisses her, movements languid and sated, tastes herself on Sharon's tongue and quivers slightly. Sharon understands now. Not human, but not machines (never machines).

They are many, infinitely so, yet all the same.

-end-

01.31.08


End file.
